Michael McCarty

Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, PA

In the Jōkyū Disturbance of 1221, the retired emperor Go-Toba (1180-1239) embarked on a war to uproot the warrior government known as the Kamakura Bakufu. Though Go-Toba called on all warriors of the land to join his campaign, few outside of his personal guard rallied to his cause, and he was defeated and sent into exile within a month. Drawing insights from texts that have never been studied in English, this paper recovers the complex reasons that helped determine who was receptive to Go-Toba’s overtures. Though much work has been done to evaluate the men who joined the retired emperor, these studies have hinged their explanations solely on the matter of economic gain, restricting the explanation of Go-Toba’s support to his officer’s self-interest. This paper examines key Bakufu soldiers who defected to Go-Toba to recapture the idiosyncratic and highly personal motivations that shaped the Jōkyū Disturbance. This approach reveals the primacy of interpersonal relations—rather than overarching ideas of loyalty or social identity—for people in medieval Japan. The patchwork nature of the imperial army reminds us that the Jōkyū Disturbance was no oppositional showdown between court and Bakufu writ large. Furthermore, the fact that Go-Toba’s supporters joined him for reasons unrelated to his imperial authority or even his economic largesse gives us cause to reevaluate our understanding of divine kingship in pre-modern society more broadly.

European Association for Japanese Studies, Lisbon, Portugal

The Jōkyū Disturbance of 1221, in which powerful retired emperor Go-Toba was exiled after military defeat by the Kamakura Bakufu, rent the fabric of Japanese political ideology. The fact that a “heavenly sovereign” of the Japanese throne had been defeated by a warrior government with no such claims to divine authority posed deep problems for theodicy, kingship and authority. In the aftermath of the Jōkyū Disturbance, however, it was ironically tales on events before 1221 that most caught the attention of medieval writers. The texts that did discuss Jōkyū were much less inventive and prolific, never becoming enshrined in the pre-modern cultural imagination like works about the earlier Genpei War (1180–85). Yet precisely because the Jōkyū corpus had a relatively contracted period of textual development, the majority of Jōkyū texts predate the majority of narratives about the Genpei War. Thus, we are left with a historiographical time-warp: texts on the later Jōkyū event give an earlier picture of Kamakura society than their Genpei cousins, while texts ostensibly about the twelfth century reflect the changed realities of warrior and court power after 1221. Building upon the suggestion of some scholars that all war tales written after 1221 betray a “post-Jōkyū historical consciousness,” this paper will evaluate the intersections of history, memory, and authority in a variety of writings from the Kamakura period (1185–1333). In this “broad” thirteenth century, texts on past conflicts inevitably treated the position of the retired emperor as a touchstone for issues of power and (mis)rule. I will argue that the figure of Go-Toba, the sovereign whose mismanagement of affairs led to open conflict between court and Bakufu, looms behind the portrayal of other emperors in war tales describing the earlier Hōgen (1156), Heiji (1159), and Genpei (1185) wars, revealing the changing ideology of kingship and power in the thirteenth century. These and other parallels between Jōkyū and earlier conflicts also suggests medieval writers were more comfortable confronting the problems of 1221 indirectly through discussion of earlier events, forcing scholars to think more carefully about our conceptions of genre, periodization, and memory in pre-modern Japan.

Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Bloomington, IN

In the early 1970s Japanese rock music underwent a revolution, not in musical style but in lyrics. Most rock bands since the 1960s from the so-called “Group Sounds” genre—heavily influenced by British and American rock & roll—had preferred to set their rock music to lyrics in English. But newly emerging bands such as Happy End began advocating making rock with Japanese lyrics. A battle between these two approaches marked publications in the new Japanese rock press, and manifested itself in the commercial and critical success of the songs and albums released by 70s rock bands on both sides. The eventual success of Happy End’s approach led to the wholesale adoption of Japanese lyrics by all future rock bands and J-pop bands today. More than a historical curiosity, this “Japanese rock debate” was a site where enduring conflicts of identity, culture, nationalism and self-expression could be negotiated. For their part, advocates of English lyrics had intriguing ideas of how rock music was a universal medium not tied to national differences, while their opponents saw music and lyrics as a personal or national expression for which a "foreign" language was inadequate. Yet, ironically, the artists who embraced Japanese lyrics were often accused of producing music that was more imitative of western music than that of their counterparts. I argue these tensions of identity and culture are not unique to Japan, but are endemic in the spread of globalized mass culture and the history of the modern nation-state itself.